Comment history

Reagan's one failing was that he wimped out on a few things. They (congress+Reagan) passed 2 tax cuts and some 13 tax increases. They never made the attempt to eliminate the Departments of Educationism and Energy as mentioned as goals during the election campaign. David Stockman has noted more than once the many needed cuts that the Reagan admin simply caved on. To hear the left whine you'd have thought he was pressing them hard, cutting into the trunk; while in reality they barely snipped the tips off of a few dead twigs. (Great cartoon from that time; Stockman's Tree Surgeons.)

And Reagan's wimping out encouraged the later wimps, GHWBush and Shrub, to wimp out even worse (e.g. "assault rifle" import ban, part D, and, of course, increasing federal extortions), and encouraged the extreme leftists to go even further off the rails.

That's great. The millions of unemployed and under-employed US citizen STEM professionals can always use more employment prospects.

What software product/app firms are there in the area (not services, consulting, contracting, but firms which specialize in developing and selling actual commercial hardware/software products)?

How many local firms are designing and manufacturing better, faster, less expensive 3-D printers/prototypers/additive manufacturing devices?

Why don't I see their help-wanted ads in the margins of the article (is the mill operator ad from a firm ashamed to post its name, e-mail address and phone number?)? (not sure whether to stick a smiley or frown emoticon to that one; perhaps it deserves one of each)

There are already, de facto, 2 states: Gaza=Palestine and Israel. Israelis accept the Palestinians. But the Palestinians, PLO, PA, Hamas+Fatah and now ISIL have declared their intent to eliminate all of Israel, establishing a caliphate from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean (only the Sunni vs. Shia feud prevents them from aiming to make it from Persia/Iran through Egypt in the short term)... and eventually a one-world caliphate.

After studying the historical maps and reading the news, I think the Palestinians who don't want to live peacefully in Israel should move out of eastern Israel back to Palestine=Gaza, and the Israelis should generously grant an expansion of Palestine=Gaza's bounds within reason... especially toward the south, but away from Israel's natural gas lines, railroads and such, and in any case inland from the Mediterranean, so long as Egypt is accepting of a broader border with Palestine. Of course, peaceful Palestinians are already granted the privilege of living throughout Israel if they so choose.

Israel already ceded historical parts of Israel to Jordan to the east and Syria and Lebanon to the north.

Gaza=Palestine should spend more of their aid to build wells, desalinization plants, irrigation pipe-lines, farms and housing... and a lot less on tunnels and rockets to attack Israel and Egypt.

Genetically/DNA-wise, after several thousands of years of intermarriages, the Israelis and Palestinians are almost all not-that-distant cousins, but then, historically, feuds between/among cousins have been frequent (Duncan, MacBeth, Malcolm iii; John Baliol vs. Robert de Brus; John Murray lord Dunmore vs. Robert Hanna from about 1600 through 1781; the sheriffs Agnew vs. lords Kennedy; the mostly Presbyterian Irish-Scottish-Irish vs. the Catholic southern Irish; Nicky & Willy & Victoria (Russia & Germany & England); Ukraine, Russia; good Wenceslaus and his brother cruel Boleslav; the USA vs. CSA featured many brothers and cousins split between the sides...).

It was the Romans who applied the general label of Palestine to what then were Palestine, Judea and Israel plus most of what is now Lebanon and part of what is now Syria (the Assyrians/Ashurians had been further north). Then again, for the sake of more context and completeness, the biblical bounds had the land promised to the sons of Israel stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile, which they never effectively held though Israelis did travel back and forth through that region to carry out trade, and I just don't see the Israelis even wanting that. Then again, when the sons of Israel arrived the Palestinians/Philistines were relative new-comers from the Greek islands who had invaded the Canaanites' lands. Before the Romans came through, the Phoenicians (who may have come from the same Greek islands) held the area north of Israel along the sea, plus Carthage/Tunisia/Punicia/African Phoenicia for a time.

Hrmph. I put part of the blame on the Shrub and Obummer, Clinton, and GHW and the Federal Reserve Board for 100 years of inflation and for 25-50 years (or maybe it's 125 years) of excessive importation of cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled foreign labor with flexible ethics. It's driven down the economy, and it's driven down morality, while in the past the ethical people in a field could simply refuse to do unethical things at work.

So, the prices of copper and brass are up, employment is down, while population and over-crowding are up... and the governments (local, state, federal) are more power-mad and corrupt than ever in the USA.

Or is this a sign of more corruption local, state, and federal? ("Sure, we've recorded without warrants every phone conversation even the meek underdog Shoeshine ever made, and regularly use such for political blackmail and extortion, but we're not going to release to the court those revealing the corruption of 'our guys'.")

And so the GHWBush-Clinton-Shrub-Obummer economic depression continues. Discouraged from starting businesses, from hiring actual US citizens, from building and creating, but plenty of handouts for the down-spiral of destruction, and plenty of visas to bring in cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled foreign labor with flexible ethics.

The BLS figures this month showed a close to 31.5M jobs dearth from historical periods which more closely resembled full employment (based on employment/population ratios).

Over the last 15 years, only between one-third and one-half of each year's US citizen STEM grads from universities have landed STEM jobs... (Teitelbaum, Kuehn, Lowell, Salzman several studies) and it gets worse in the years after graduation (Steve Richfield, IEEE USA unemployment survey 1998; NSF and Census bureau 1998; CS professor Norm Matloff; Margie Wylie "Signal 2 Noise" _CNET_.)

We have about 2 million degreed US citizen STEM pros who can't get STEM jobs. (Camarota based on BLS data)

Unemployment rates for STEM occupations have been running 2-3 times as high as during periods of full employment (BLS quarterly & annual unemployment rates by detailed occupations through 2014Q1).

No evidence of actual shortage of STEM talent has ever been presented, though many assertions have been made by executives of STEM firms, by immigration lawyers, and by others with a personal interest in driving down compensation and working conditions in STEM fields. No economic data suggests a shortage; there is no evidence of extraordinarily high compensation, no evidence of extraordinary effort to recruit. There is evidence that managers consider US STEM professionals to be superior (based on surveys by former cross-border bodyshopper Vivek Wadhwa).

Nick Crescimanno is working on the pneumatics?Kyle Thompson is programming it?

How can that be? We were just told a couple days ago that American students are all ignorant, low-intelligence, under-achievers -- nearly 70% of the locals aspiring to university requrie remedial math and English. Yet here are HS students doing real engineering and software development, and "they really do a good job".

But that probably won't stop the lobbyists for the execs, immigration lawyers, and leftists.

OTOH, the writer could use a little help with how electric motors work. The energy stored in the battery drives the DC motors (I'll grant that almost any such motor is actually a motor/generator, so you could conceivably drive it back the other way, but that's not what they're doing here).